Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane, or can drive us mad by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane, or can drive us mad by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, HG Publishing, £16.99, ISBN 1899398368

WHY we, and apparently other animals, dream is a mystery of science. Or at least it would be, if these private phenomena of the night fell within the grasp of science. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick have had a stab at suggesting why we dream - what biological or psychological functions dreams might serve. Long before Freud, the ancient Greeks speculated about this, and since then we have had proposals that they are anticipations of the next world (Jung), predict future events (J. W. Dunne), erase erroneous associations (Crick), and other more physiological ideas. The thesis in Dreaming Reality is that dreams are extensions of daytime thinking with metaphors, and emotionally loaded. So thinking effectively and feeling affectively are linked in sleep.

Examples of interpreted dreams ...

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